Herein, a “virtual meeting” is a meeting in which participants use technology to communicate with one another, typically because not all participants are in the same physical location. For example, a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) teleconferencing system is suitable for enabling virtual meetings.
As the popularity of virtual meetings has increased, so have efforts to make virtual meetings more reliable and productive. For example, it is recognised that sometimes a participant in a virtual meeting will temporarily become disconnected from the virtual meeting, e.g. due to network problems affecting the participant's uplink and/or downlink with one or more servers hosting the virtual meeting. In connection with this inconvenience, the United States patent application published under number US 2010/0150320 A1, titled “Handling Communication Session Disconnection and Reconnection,” provides a system which records “missed information” that is communicated between participants in a virtual meeting while one or more other participants are temporarily disconnected from the virtual meeting. If the temporarily-disconnected participant(s) re-join the virtual meeting while it is still ongoing, the system begins replaying the missed information to the temporarily-disconnected participant(s) on re-joining the virtual meeting. A benefit of this is that it can obviate the need for the temporarily-disconnected participant(s) to ask one or more of the other participants to summarise the missed information.
There remain opportunities to improve the ways systems deal with the re-joining or late-joining of virtual meetings by participants.
All the Figures are schematic and generally only show parts which are necessary in order to elucidate the disclosure, whereas other parts may be omitted or merely suggested. Unless otherwise indicated, like reference numerals refer to like parts in different Figures.